women, sex, dating...scandalous!

Busy, busy, busy! Man, there has just been so much stuff going on this week I am a pooped puppy, but I can’t resist the urge to write. This week has been “wrap-it-up” week at school since it’s the end of the first quarter and the second Eid is coming up. Yay for vacation! I need one bad. I had to fill out progress reports this week. We also had “fun-day” which was the most pointless waste of a school day ever. “Fun-day” basically consisted of a bunch of blow up bouncy things, music and a lot of just standing around. I will say that there was a rather intriguing blow up thing that was basically a life size Foosball table. The sides were air filled tubes with big nets on either end with poles running all along the middle where small children could Velcro themselves into their respective spots on the “table”. There was also some gladiator type stuff where the P.E. teacher set up a balance beam and put kids in plastic vests and gave them jousting sticks. The only protection from the hard asphalt below were a few scattered quarter inch thick mats. Paul and I watched for impending doom but luckily no one was seriously injured.

I also had parent-teacher conferences today, which I found out about…this morning! Parents are stressful. But Ms. Samar was so wonderful! She teased me for being so nervous, and then acted as my translator.

Thanksgiving was also this weekend. We had to postpone celebrating until after the weekend with all the school stuff. We managed to pull off a feast on Saturday which was surprisingly American, hahaha! No turkey, but a ton of chicken complete with stuffing, green bean casserole, orange-ginger carrots, ambrosia, mashed potatoes, gravy, and apple pie…mmmm. The ingredients were a pain to come by and our gas tank for the oven and the stove ran out about halfway through. Nothing to stress about though, with a little help from the door guys downstairs, we successfully had the tank replaced within the hour. I’m really excited about all the leftovers in our fridge.

Besides looking for tutoring gigs, I’ve also been hosting events with my roommates. I feel a little skeazy about it, but the events and the pay make it worth it. Basically it’s this agency that gets cute girls to dress up and temp-host high end events which could involve anything from seating people, passing out fliers, giving out prizes, etc. etc. etc. The one I’ll be working in December is a concert Mobinile is hosting at the pyramids, and it’s my job to seat the VIP’s…yeah!

I’m kind of disappointed we’re not going to wear the original dress for the event. It the weirdest outfit I've ever seen! Think black witch/gladiator costume. It was black and silver with a giant cross at the breast, another big dangling cross on a belt, complete with a headband and a cape. I would have loved to have gotten some pictures in it. Anyway, it was terrible, and they were having trouble getting girls to agree to wear it, so now we’re wearing black pants with white button up shirts. They’re providing the pants and shoes, and I get to keep them along with the 300LE they’re going to pay me for one night of work! Pretty sweet deal. Not to mention the event is going to take place at the pyramids in the evening and there’s potential for a light show. I haven’t even been up close and personal with the pyramids yet!

So I mentioned last time I’d talk some about women, sex, dating, etc. in Egypt, and once again, I’m at a loss for where to start. On the surface, it seems like Egypt’s a relatively progressive society. “Relatively” is the key word here. There’s a pleasantly surprising mix of veiled as well as un-veiled women, with about a handful of Burka’s thrown in. But the veil is really the least bit confusing part about women’s role in Egypt.

Let me stress that women here do have the potential to achieve anything they put their minds to, and some overcome the obstacles and succeeded…however, you can still seriously sense the oppressiveness in the air. There are a lot small instances or circumstances that may strike the average liberal American as a bit strange.

Egyptians have incredible respect and love for their families, and thus divorce rates are relatively low, but they still exist. I happened to be doing a little research on Egyptians right to divorce out of plain curiosity and was disturbed to discover reforms to women's rights to divorce have only recently leveled the playing field a little. Men have an unquestionable right to divorce. They have the power to divorce their wife for any reason, and assets and alimony are always distributed equally. In the wife’s case, she must go to court and apply for an “at-fault” divorce, which basically means she has to provide proof that she has been harmed during her marriage. One article stated that even in domestic violence cases, the woman must have eye witness testimonies in order for her claims to be valid. If she "wins", she's free and alimony is distributed equally. Until now, those were the options. If she wasn't able to prove she was harmed by her marriage, that's it. She simply had to live with it. The only recently added the option for a “no-fault” divorce. This allows the woman to divorce her husband for any reason, but she relinquishes any financial rights and is required to pay back the dowry gifted to her by her husband.

My roommates have also noted many Egyptian women tend to be total gossip hounds, and are incredibly jealous and catty. I sympathize. I can’t help but think of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex where she discusses the habits of the women in the Victorian period. Many of these women were backstabbing and viscous, which De Beauvoir pointed out was because women were only able to improve their social standing through marriage; therefore women were in constant competition with one another. Now maybe it’s a stretch, but because Egyptian women are (for the most part) expected to get married and play the typical role of the good housewife, their catty gossiping ways may be similarly attributed to De Beauvoir’s observations.

Dating is one of the most difficult things to understand in Egypt. There’s no one answer you’ll get for anything, it’s contradictory, and full of unwritten rules. The first thing I noticed while I was here was that almost every Egyptian we knew between the ages of 20-23 is or has been engaged. The ending of an engagement, in my humble opinion, is similar to the ending of a serious or long-term relationship. After a lot of questions and a lot of ambiguous answers, the way I understand it is this. While youngsters are able to do a mild bit of dating, if they continue to see the same person for an extended period of time; questions get raised and family members begin to get skeptical…so to satisfy the older generation, youngsters are agreeing to get engaged so they can hold the relationship in this dating period without upsetting tradition. This allows them to continue a long term relationship by basically legitimizing it to the rest of society. But, as many of you have probably guessed, these relationships seem to end before they make it to the big day.

Sex? The big question. It’s another confusing one, but I’ll give it what I can. Couples are technically not supposed to have sex until they're married. There are several parts to the marriage. After the paperwork is completed, they young couple is officially married and able to consummate the marriage. After some time, there is a big ceremony, and a party after which I would equate to a wedding reception. At this time, everyone knows the young couple are sleeping together and there are giggles and the guys are slapping the groom on the back and the girls are asking the bride what it was like, etc, etc, etc. So this is the ideal situation. Young Egyptians do have sex, but it’s complicated and generally more complicated for women. Courting is a must and the relationship moves much, MUCH slower than a typical American relationship. Also, women that have sex are not always regarded very highly. A man might casually date a woman he's having sex with, but just knowing they "put-out" means they get the boot from the marriage market. I can’t forget the disgusted feeling I got when one of our Egyptian friends, during a discussion, said he would only marry a virgin, not long after discussing some of his escapades with various women. “Why? You’ve had sex? Why can’t she have sex?” was the general consensus, which only got us a few mumbles and something about how men need more practice at sex than women.

On that note, one of my roommates recently dated an Egyptian guy. Apparently the sex wasn’t so great. From the gist of it, he simply had no idea what to do, and was completely opposed to giving oral sex (but okay with receiving it). Now this guy did turn out to be a pretty all around douche bag, but (and I may be generalizing too much here) I would still venture to say that this may not be too far from the norm. If women are supposed to be submissive, I’m not sure pleasure on the women’s front is highest in a list of priorities.

My roommate Faye had a much more interesting discussion in the teachers lounge about masturbation. Funny thing is I can’t believe these women were bold enough to be talking about it in public. I don’t know the whole story since I wasn’t there, she explained many of the women had differing views. Some felt it was hazardous to your health. Some felt the men in their lives would not approve of such a thing. And, some felt that it may be “okay”. One woman, who just got pregnant, blamed birth control for the 7 years prior of trying without success, and was hell bound on convincing the other young women that birth control was unhealthy. I guess her doctor attributed her infertility to her birth control. Another friend of ours told us that another doctor told her the small bumps you can sometimes get on the back of your upper arms were due to masturbation. What?!!!

Also, men and women, who are not married, are not supposed to sleep in the same home together. Not usually a problem for Egyptians in that most of them live with their parents, but it does become a problem even when traveling together and getting a hotel room. Egyptians of the opposite gender who are not married are not allowed share a room. In order to rent a room, they must provide their marriage certificate. If they were to rent separate rooms, and then sneak into one another’s rooms, the police would be notified and the guy would be taken home and the woman to jail. Paul and I didn’t have any trouble on our trip because we are foreigners. All we had to do was show the hotel a copy of our passports.

Foreigners have their own standard of conduct which is far less restrictive than any Egyptians. We are not held to many of the moral codes here. But that’s a whole other story. We are however having some recent problems at the boy’s apartment. Because our apartments are parent free (unique to many Egyptian apartments as I mentioned earlier), they have become kind of a hub for other Egyptians to hang out at. Fine, except that apparently the neighbors in Paul’s apartment are very upset at the amount of girls coming over all the time, which is putting Paul and Tom in a possible homeless situation. No reason to worry yet. I have high hopes for this one. Paul and Tom’s apartment leaves little to be desired and this whole thing may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Well, I’m exhausted and I’m hoping to post some more pictures so I’ll go ahead and end this here. There should be several more posts rolling in so happy reading!